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Awful article advocating appeal to authority by alternative means. >Free speech liberalism used to seem compatible with a functional society in a way that it n

Awful article advocating appeal to authority by alternative means. >Free speech liberalism used to seem compatible with a functional society in a way that it now does not. False premise. Only the censors agree with this. Free speech is a tenant of any functional society. How can anyone continue reading beyond this kind of absurd presupposition? Of course these statements are always followed with naive, juvenile, authoritative, first-order thinking. As is the case with this article.

paulddraper 4y ago
The Means Justify the Ends
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
SubiculumCode 4y ago
Only the censors agree with this? What kind of rhetoric is that? So I am a censor if I think misinformation is a problem? This essay is much more thought out and rational than your flame-bait response.
- kodyo 4y ago
  You’re a censor if you try to censor it.
- justforaskin 4y ago
  The flame bait response, as you put it, is more terse than the article. We’ve seen the appeal to authority and the censoring of those who questioned the science writ large over Covid. We’ve seen it heavily on this platform. Censoring things that have facts is wrong.
  - SubiculumCode 4y ago
    but the article is not even advocating censorship.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  You’re pro-censorship if you think the solution to misinformation is censorship. By definition.
  - amalcon 4y ago
    Neither the article nor grandparent said they think the solution to misinformation is censorship.
- Banana699 4y ago
  That misinformation is a problem doesn't make censorship a solution. By the time you have to shut people down from saying stupid things you're already far gone down the clusterfuck path. (and that's assuming the 'misinformation' is true false&harmful beliefs, not just whatever idea that contradicts the fashionable Current Thing.) Let's say that people think MD5 is a good cryptographic hash function. The worst single possible thing you can do is ban-hammer the promoters of this idea away. This is extremely dumb "Kill The Messenger" thinking, the promoters of those idea are exposing real communication problems (namely, the use of "hash function" to denote roughly similar concepts but are also very different in very important details). What you do, if you really think this Md5-is-cryptographically-secure problem is serious, is that you treat the success of the promoters of this false idea as a measure for how hard you failed to communicate basic cryptography to software devs. Do a modification to your education\media ecosystem, then measure how successful the false prophets are, if their success goes up or stays constant then you still haven't addressed the real problem, if it goes down then you're successfully fighting "misinformation", repeat till you drive their popularity to the ground.
  - SubiculumCode 4y ago
    But neither I nor the article is advocating for censorship.
    - Banana699 4y ago
      You are though, you just want to call it by a different name.
akomtu 4y ago
"Free speech used to be compatible with interests of the royalty, but as the society has grown bigger, the royalty and freedom of speech can no longer coexist, and one of them has to go." would be a more honest statement.
whatever1 4y ago
Free speech != free brainwashing at scale. I can today start for pennies an ad and bot campaign targeting 100s of millions of people claiming that the earth is square and that n0tth3dro1ds is on the payroll from the establishment to claim otherwise. I must have the right to say whatever bs I want. But I don't think that I can demand the right to have a powerful platform to distribute my nonsense.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  How is that different than ads in a newspaper? …or on radio? …or on television? — all of which have been used by elites to spread misinformation. Why is the solution censorship rather than better analysis and consensus mechanisms? I think you’re ignoring the second-order effects of mass censorship eg, the Thailand study [1] suggests vaccine censorship and failure to address concerns may have been a catastrophic mistake. We need to seek consensus through discussion and debate — to avoid lying to ourselves and thus engaging in horrors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekTR0w2M9-U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekTR0w2M9-U
  - Arainach 4y ago
    All of those have a higher financial bar to entry and have never been considered free speech. Publishing/distribution companies have rejected ads in the newspaper/super bowl/radio all the time for as long as those forms have existed.
    - zmgsabst 4y ago
      Yes — the only difference between your example and those is that ad networks democratize information, rather than spreading misinformation being an elite privilege. How is that worse than Yellow Journalism?
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  The largest source of propaganda in the English speaking western world is the US. True or false?
Spivak 4y ago
Am not a censor, I agree with this. What people call “free speech” is really “free mouth utterances” with basically no consideration of whether or not what is being said is actually a sincerely held belief being expressed in good faith. Because the belief that current public discourse is anything at all a marketplace of ideas or some collective Socratic circle is also extremely naive and juvenile. By making no distinction between (picking an obviously repulsive view) a post that outlines someone’s argument why they believe black people are predisposed to be thieves and some photoshopped stock photo of a black kid stealing watermelon and fried chicken with the caption “ni**, right?” [1] we just let hate, and the irl consequences, spread while choking off actual speech. You kill the very thing you wanted to protect with free speech in the first place. Free speech should be measured in “freedom as in liberty” instead of “freedom as in anarchy.” [1] This was, not even exaggerated, real content you could find on some now banned subreddits, one of them rhymes with moon town.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  An obvious repulsive view is a subjective statement that changes based on the listener. Imagine by John Lennon is a great example that caused many to ban him for suggesting a world without religion was ideal while others are emotional moved by it.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    We’re not disagreeing on this, I picked a broadly agreed on repulsive view because I wanted to have an example of a gross view that still deserved protection because it was made in good faith.
wussboy 4y ago
Free speech is a tenant of functional society but it is not the only tenant nor is it the most important one. The Internet tends to focus on it because free speech is what it’s best at. And while that focus is important, it’s time we changed its primacy so that we can see its effect on other critical, more subtle, tenants.
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  I disagree with that. Free speech is that important and a reduction here will cost us all.
Barrin92 4y ago
most of humanity's longest existing civilizations don't care about free speech, or liberalism altogether for that matter which is a fairly novel experiment in and of itself. You used like half a dozen adjectives in a two word sentence to express your discontent with censorship without advancing any point. Any real discussion would need to leave the ideology behind and ask some actual questions. Why is censorship bad? (rather than making the trivially wrong assumption that everyone who disagrees with you is a censor). Why should free speech be absolute, rather than differential, how does that relate to the abundance of information and modern technologies abuse of it etc. Dogmatic belief in free speech just reveals that no thinking is going on. It's a sacred cow, just like democracy or the meaningless phrase 'freedom', any criticism of which gets the same response you get from devout Muslims if you were to criticize the Quran. 'Free speech' itself is ironically enough a loaded phrase that tries to suffocate any view that dares to be anything less than 'free' right from the outset. Rhetorically everyone who disagrees is already "unfree" by definition, and what kind of barbarian wants that?
rocqua 4y ago
When you continue reading beyond this presupposition, the author does not conclude we need better or more accurate censorship. Instead his point is that we need new ways for building consensus that crosses partisan lines. Then he hypothesizes mechanisms for building this consensus without needing censorship. His point regarding free speech is that, in the current world, bad faith speech, self-serving speech and the suspicion that speech could be bad-faith or self-serving, are breaking our ability to reach consensus. This is bad because it immobilizes politics unless someone 'wins' which only serves to mobilize the faction who 'lost'.

paulddraper 4y ago

The Means Justify the Ends

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

SubiculumCode 4y ago

Only the censors agree with this? What kind of rhetoric is that? So I am a censor if I think misinformation is a problem? This essay is much more thought out and rational than your flame-bait response.

kodyo 4y ago
You’re a censor if you try to censor it.
justforaskin 4y ago
The flame bait response, as you put it, is more terse than the article. We’ve seen the appeal to authority and the censoring of those who questioned the science writ large over Covid. We’ve seen it heavily on this platform. Censoring things that have facts is wrong.
- SubiculumCode 4y ago
  but the article is not even advocating censorship.
zmgsabst 4y ago
You’re pro-censorship if you think the solution to misinformation is censorship. By definition.
- amalcon 4y ago
  Neither the article nor grandparent said they think the solution to misinformation is censorship.
Banana699 4y ago
That misinformation is a problem doesn't make censorship a solution. By the time you have to shut people down from saying stupid things you're already far gone down the clusterfuck path. (and that's assuming the 'misinformation' is true false&harmful beliefs, not just whatever idea that contradicts the fashionable Current Thing.) Let's say that people think MD5 is a good cryptographic hash function. The worst single possible thing you can do is ban-hammer the promoters of this idea away. This is extremely dumb "Kill The Messenger" thinking, the promoters of those idea are exposing real communication problems (namely, the use of "hash function" to denote roughly similar concepts but are also very different in very important details). What you do, if you really think this Md5-is-cryptographically-secure problem is serious, is that you treat the success of the promoters of this false idea as a measure for how hard you failed to communicate basic cryptography to software devs. Do a modification to your education\media ecosystem, then measure how successful the false prophets are, if their success goes up or stays constant then you still haven't addressed the real problem, if it goes down then you're successfully fighting "misinformation", repeat till you drive their popularity to the ground.
- SubiculumCode 4y ago
  But neither I nor the article is advocating for censorship.
  - Banana699 4y ago
    You are though, you just want to call it by a different name.

akomtu 4y ago

"Free speech used to be compatible with interests of the royalty, but as the society has grown bigger, the royalty and freedom of speech can no longer coexist, and one of them has to go." would be a more honest statement.

whatever1 4y ago

Free speech != free brainwashing at scale. I can today start for pennies an ad and bot campaign targeting 100s of millions of people claiming that the earth is square and that n0tth3dro1ds is on the payroll from the establishment to claim otherwise. I must have the right to say whatever bs I want. But I don't think that I can demand the right to have a powerful platform to distribute my nonsense.

zmgsabst 4y ago
How is that different than ads in a newspaper? …or on radio? …or on television? — all of which have been used by elites to spread misinformation. Why is the solution censorship rather than better analysis and consensus mechanisms? I think you’re ignoring the second-order effects of mass censorship eg, the Thailand study [1] suggests vaccine censorship and failure to address concerns may have been a catastrophic mistake. We need to seek consensus through discussion and debate — to avoid lying to ourselves and thus engaging in horrors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekTR0w2M9-U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekTR0w2M9-U
- Arainach 4y ago
  All of those have a higher financial bar to entry and have never been considered free speech. Publishing/distribution companies have rejected ads in the newspaper/super bowl/radio all the time for as long as those forms have existed.
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    Yes — the only difference between your example and those is that ad networks democratize information, rather than spreading misinformation being an elite privilege. How is that worse than Yellow Journalism?
raxxorraxor 4y ago
The largest source of propaganda in the English speaking western world is the US. True or false?

Spivak 4y ago

Am not a censor, I agree with this. What people call “free speech” is really “free mouth utterances” with basically no consideration of whether or not what is being said is actually a sincerely held belief being expressed in good faith. Because the belief that current public discourse is anything at all a marketplace of ideas or some collective Socratic circle is also extremely naive and juvenile. By making no distinction between (picking an obviously repulsive view) a post that outlines someone’s argument why they believe black people are predisposed to be thieves and some photoshopped stock photo of a black kid stealing watermelon and fried chicken with the caption “ni**, right?” [1] we just let hate, and the irl consequences, spread while choking off actual speech. You kill the very thing you wanted to protect with free speech in the first place. Free speech should be measured in “freedom as in liberty” instead of “freedom as in anarchy.” [1] This was, not even exaggerated, real content you could find on some now banned subreddits, one of them rhymes with moon town.

ipaddr 4y ago
An obvious repulsive view is a subjective statement that changes based on the listener. Imagine by John Lennon is a great example that caused many to ban him for suggesting a world without religion was ideal while others are emotional moved by it.
- Spivak 4y ago
  We’re not disagreeing on this, I picked a broadly agreed on repulsive view because I wanted to have an example of a gross view that still deserved protection because it was made in good faith.

wussboy 4y ago

Free speech is a tenant of functional society but it is not the only tenant nor is it the most important one. The Internet tends to focus on it because free speech is what it’s best at. And while that focus is important, it’s time we changed its primacy so that we can see its effect on other critical, more subtle, tenants.

raxxorraxor 4y ago
I disagree with that. Free speech is that important and a reduction here will cost us all.

Barrin92 4y ago

most of humanity's longest existing civilizations don't care about free speech, or liberalism altogether for that matter which is a fairly novel experiment in and of itself. You used like half a dozen adjectives in a two word sentence to express your discontent with censorship without advancing any point. Any real discussion would need to leave the ideology behind and ask some actual questions. Why is censorship bad? (rather than making the trivially wrong assumption that everyone who disagrees with you is a censor). Why should free speech be absolute, rather than differential, how does that relate to the abundance of information and modern technologies abuse of it etc. Dogmatic belief in free speech just reveals that no thinking is going on. It's a sacred cow, just like democracy or the meaningless phrase 'freedom', any criticism of which gets the same response you get from devout Muslims if you were to criticize the Quran. 'Free speech' itself is ironically enough a loaded phrase that tries to suffocate any view that dares to be anything less than 'free' right from the outset. Rhetorically everyone who disagrees is already "unfree" by definition, and what kind of barbarian wants that?

rocqua 4y ago

When you continue reading beyond this presupposition, the author does not conclude we need better or more accurate censorship. Instead his point is that we need new ways for building consensus that crosses partisan lines. Then he hypothesizes mechanisms for building this consensus without needing censorship. His point regarding free speech is that, in the current world, bad faith speech, self-serving speech and the suspicion that speech could be bad-faith or self-serving, are breaking our ability to reach consensus. This is bad because it immobilizes politics unless someone 'wins' which only serves to mobilize the faction who 'lost'.